cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/19004972
Let’s be honest, the real reason Lemmy build most of its traffic is because of Reddit users. But the thing is, outside of the mass exodus in the west that too from the PC era… people discover and join Reddit not because it’s another social media like Facebook or Twitter that people need to reserve their usernames on like a brand or celebrity but because Google Search is kinda… actually absolute trash by SEO and machine learning crawlers.
Most of the world (I am from India btw, hello~) join or even discover reddit because they’re trying to search for actual solutions, recommendations, advice or even reviews by actual experienced people without having to go through another YouTuber which can stem from troubleshooting a router, finding an actual FOSS option or seeking immediate solutions to the recent CrowdStrike fiasco for example. After having to visit reddit every time whenever using a search engine including for education to career advice, I ended up directly signing up with reddit a decade ago.
Recently, Reddit even restricted its search results to Google only in a business partnership meaning those using Bing, DuckDuckGo to Ecosia or even SearchGPT wouldn’t be able to access Reddit answers anymore. Say, if someone searches for how to block ads on chrome as example - Solutions like uBlock Origin come into existence and continue to exist because of the combined community in Reddit that Lemmy is trying to preserve.
Unlike others, am not saying Lemmy would be dead but it would be pretty much like Discord-Telegram or Tumblr instead of wiping Reddit or correcting Facebook. Reddit is not something you discover from word-of-mouth or join from peer pressure unlike other social media which is even truer for Lemmy but because it actually helps and is useful to people.
Lemmy can’t be taking the path of 𝕏 (Alone Mask’s Twitter) but any of the good platforms were before the Enshittification with Facebook’s way~
but Lemmy already does show up on Google results
I clicked that link and the first dozen results were Reddit posts and garbage
Isn’t Lemmy content being openly indexed by most search engines? I think we just don’t have the years of content here, so it’s not going to have the same gravity.
Also, I wonder about all the varied domain names of all the servers. Would search engines treat them all as separate sites, and calculate page rank for each separately? If that’s the case, the influence of Lemmy in search results would be even lower.
It is and search engines do treat them separately, which is problematic, as seeing the same content on multiple domains may be seen as spammy and lead to downranking.
https://github.com/marsara9/lemmy-search tried to fix this, but was put on hold due to some perf issues with a lemmy update.
Kagi recently added a fediverse filter, though I barely use it because there are rarely good results. Just isn’t much content worth searching on lemmy yet
I don’t think this is true, Lemmy is already using rel="canonical" which should be telling Google what the real URL is, like here on programming.dev I see this in the page source
<link data-inferno-helmet="true" rel="canonical" href="https://lemmy.world/post/19493729">
which is why the Google results for this search don’t show a million different instances mirroring it
https://www.semrush.com/blog/canonical-url-guide/
Here was the discussion about it where it was fixed last year https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ui/issues/1418
Listen, it’s not our job to make Google search result better. They could have easily parsed apub sites like lemmy correctly of they want, but they’re so enshittified there’s low chance of that. But that doesn’t mean we should be trying to fix their shit.
Is there even a good alternative to Google? DuckDuckGo does not count to me as it is close source
You are assuming the point of this is to be famous rather than non profit niche community driven
It’s a bad idea to compare Lemmy to Reddit or expect Lemmy to replace Reddit.
Slow growth is not a problem, it’s actually a benefit.
There is no hurry, and no need to push for high user counts.
Rather than trying to attract more people, focus on making your communities an attractive place to be.
